Health in Social Context

Sergio Urzúa's research has focused on the role of cognitive and noncognitive abilities, and uncertainty as determinants of schooling decisions, labor market outcomes and social behavior. His research in econometrics is mainly concerned with the estimation of selection models with unobserved heterogeneity. Recently, he has analyzed the effects of early endowments on academic and labor market outcomes. His research agenda includes the evaluation of social programs in developing economies.

Marie Thoma is an Associate Professor in the Department of Family Science at the University of Maryland School of Public Health. She received her PhD from the Department of Population, Family, and Reproductive Health and her MHS from the Department of Biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH). Dr. Thoma is a reproductive and perinatal epidemiologist / population health scientist focusing on the measurement, influences, and impact of maternal and infant health, birth spacing, and infertility at the population level.

I am interested in the social and structural determinants of women's sexual and reproductive health, with a geographical focus on sub-Saharan Africa. I have focused on two areas to date - women's sexual behavior within the context of HIV prevention, and fertility. With respect to women's sexual behavior I have examined the roles of race and ethnicity in shaping women sex workers' health concerns and have contributed to defining, measuring and conceptualizing "transactional sex" and its role in young women's HIV risk.

Julia R. Steinberg has a background in social and quantitative psychology, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in reproductive health. Before coming to Maryland, she was faculty in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. Her research is at the intersection of psychology and reproductive health, and has focused on unintended pregnancy and mental health. Much of her research has sought to understand the relationship between abortion and subsequent mental health, in part for the policy implications.

Dr. Smith-Bynum received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Virginia in 1999. Before joining the University of Maryland in 2010, she taught at Purdue University in the Departments of African American Studies, Psychological Sciences, and Child Development and Family Studies. Her current research interests include parenting in ecological context, African American mental health, adolescent mental health, African American family process, and racial identity.

Dr. Smith's research focuses on three distinct, but related, areas that lie at the intersection of medical sociology, social psychology, and race-ethnicity: (1) racial residential segregation and health, (2) stress-related mechanisms of health inequalities, and (3) social network activation during health-related crises. He draws on theories of race and racism, stress and coping frameworks, and the social network perspective to understand multilevel factors that influence health and health disparities both within and between racial-ethnic groups. Methodologically, Dr.

Dr. Shenassa's work concerns the interaction between individual and social determinants of health. This work, which is primarily focused on maternal and child health, can be further categorized into two general areas: 1) developmental sequelae of in utero exposures to toxins; and 2) social epidemiology of injury.

I am a Survey Methodologist and Applied Statistician with interests in interviewer effects, interviewer-respondent interaction, survey falsification, paradata, and modeling of complex survey data; as such, these interests relate to many areas of population research and demography. I am currently working with Prof. Sonalde Desai and Prof. Feinian Chen to design and implement the 3rd wave of the India Human Development Survey (IHDS3). IHDS3 will also be interviewing migrant panelists.

Dr. Sapkota's primary research interests lie in the area of exposure assessment and environmental epidemiology. He is interested in utilizing personal as well as population level exposure assessment methods to understand risk of risk of respiratory diseases. Current ongoing projects include 1) indoor air pollution from solid fuels and lung cancer risk in Nepal, 2) traffic exposure and risk of asthma exacerbation, and 3) climate change and respiratory diseases among representative sample of US population.

Roy’s research focuses on the life course of men on the margins of families and the work force. Through a mix of participant observation and life history interviews, he has explored the intersection of policy systems, such as welfare reform and incarceration, with parents' caregiving and providing roles. He has examined contextual barriers to involved fatherhood, including neighborhood factors that constrain physical mobility of poor young men in a 2004 paper in Social Problems.